Sayed Darwish (, ; 17 March 1892 – 14 September 1923) was an Egyptian singer and composer who was considered the father of Egyptian popular music and one of Egypt's greatest musicians and seen by some as its single greatest composer.
Early life
Sayed Darwish was born in Kôm el-Dikka Alexandria on 17 March 1892. During his childhood his family could not afford to pay for his education, so he was sent to a religious school where he mastered the recitation of the Quran, studying under Muhammad Salamah. After graduating from the religious school and gaining the title Sheikh Sayyed Darwish, he studied for two years at al-Azhar, one of the most renowned religious universities in the world. He left his studies to devote his life to music composition and singing, then entered a music school where his music teacher admired his talents and encouraged Darwish to press onward in the music field.
Darwish at that time was also trained to be a munshid (cantor). He worked as a bricklayer in order to support his family, and it so happened that the manager of a theatrical troupe, the Syrian Attalah Brothers, overheard him singing for his fellows and hired him on the spot. While touring in Syria, he had the opportunity to gain a musical education, short of finding success. He returned to Egypt before the start of the Great War, and won limited recognition by singing in the cafés and on various stages while he learned repertoire of the great composers of the 19th century, to which he added ʾadwār (musical modes) and muwashshaḥāt (Arabic poetic-form compositions) of his own. In spite of the cleverness of his compositions, he wasn't to find public acclaim, disadvantaged by his mediocre stage presence in comparison with such stars of his time as Sâlih 'Abd al-Hayy or Zakî Murâd.
Career
After too many failures in singing cafés, in 1918 he decided to follow the path of Shaykh Salama Hegazy, the pioneer of Arabic lyric theater (AAA 085) and launched into an operatic career. He settled in Cairo and got acquainted with the main companies, particularly Naguib el-Rihani (1891–1949), for whom he composed seven operettas. This gifted comedian had invented, with the playwright and poet Badie Khayri, the laughable character of Kish Kish Bey, a rich provincial mayor squandering his fortune in Cairo with ill-reputed women... The apparition of social matters and the allusions to the political situation of colonial Egypt (the 1919 "revolution") were to boost the success of the trio's operettas, such as "al-'Ashara al-Tayyiba" (The Ten of Diamonds, 1920) a nationalistic adaptation of 'Blubeard".
He became associated with the early Egyptian modernist literary movement Al-Madrasa al-Ḥaditha.
Sayyid also worked for El Rihani's rival troupe, 'Aly El Kassar's, and eventually collaborated with the Queen of Stages, singer and actress Munîra al-Mahdiyya (1884–1965), for whom he composed comic operettas such as "kullaha yawmayn" ("All of two days", 1920) and started an opera, "Cleopatra and Mark Anthony", which was to be played in 1927 with Muhammad 'Abd al-Wahhâb in the leading role. In the early twenties, all the companies sought his help. He decided to start his own company, acting at last on stage in a lead part. His two creations ("Shahrazad' and "El-Barouka", 1921) weren't as successful as planned, and he was again forced to compose for other companies from 1922 until his premature death on 15 September 1923.
Darwish's stage production is often clearly westernized: the traditional takht is replaced by a European ensemble, conducted by il Signore Casio, Darwish's maestro. Most of his operetta tunes use musical modes compatible with the piano, even if some vocal sections use other intervals, and the singing techniques employed in those compositions reveal a fascination for Italian opera, naively imitated in a cascade of oriental melismas. The light ditties of the comic plays are, from the modern point of view, much more interesting than the great opera-style arias. A number of those light melodies originally composed for Egyptian movies or theater are now part of the Egyptian folklore. Such songs as "Salma ya Salama, "Zorouni kol sana marra or EI helwa di amet te'gen" are known by all Middle-Easterners and have been sung by modern singers, as the Fayruz and Sabah Fakhry, in reorchestrated versions. Aside from this light production, Sayyid Darwîsh didn't neglect the learned repertoire, he composed about twenty muwashshahat, often played by modern conservatories and sung by Fayrûz. But his major contribution to the turn-of-the-century learned music is better understood through the ten adwâr (long metric composition in colloquial Arabic) he composed.